Hi all,
All in all a good day up in QLD, have attached some of my video captures of mostly the same scenes as in Jimmy's pics above.
....so, some of the earlier GFS runs (eg on Weds and Thurs) indicated good directional shear from 500-850mb winds suggesting a favourable situation for supercell development on Saturday afternoon across NSW northern rivers and across into South east Queensland. There were at times hints of a surface low developing in response to the upper level trough, or otherwise generally good turning between the sfc and 850mb. This raised a few eyebrows, so Jimmy and I decided on a long haul chase up into northern NSW as a start.
It soon became evident with each progressive model run that there would be quite unidirectional shear between 500-850mb, so the expectation of significant severe weather was kind of diminished by Friday -- but we were already well on the road so there was nothing to loose!
On chase day we sat at Boonah from the late morning. A line developed on radar out west of Texas (QLD) so we were hoping that isolated storms would initiate ahead of the line, which was advancing fairly quickly. A brief period of NE winds were encouraging and eventually isolated storms did develop:
...and one of these initially intensified quite rapidly with an inflow band
The problem was that the anvils were coming across, which suppressed what heating we had, and this conspired with the NW 850 winds to make these initially promising storms struggle. After giving up on these plan B was the northern end of the line that was now moving over the metro area.
We navigated our way around the city and got some good footage of the approaching shelf and the base structure of the more isolated cells on the northern end that produced large hail.
We missed our planned exit to head north to the airport and beyond and got caught in traffic as the line hit, with some small hail thrown in (1 to 1.5 cm) at Macgregor.
